“Alleged horror,” remarks a youtube description of the long-forgotten, once-lost Incubus. The poster seems to intend this as a criticism, but the film itself begs to differ. Incubus seems to delight in not being very upfront about the horror it wishes to unleash, including, quite literally, having to convince a Church that they were not making one in order to get the film made. It’s as though the film itself is afraid to call itself horror, or perhaps doesn’t want to be, all the more potent for a text feeling itself out in the moment, and that doesn’t want to stick around to let us figure it out. It’s a subterranean film, so much so that the actor playing the titular demon awakened late on, and who seems none too pleased about being back on this earth, would be back in the grave before the film’s release.

Incubus is a work that makes a virtue, or demon, out of necessity. It stalks our pretensions of perfect cinema. Written on the fly so that Leslie Stevens could keep up the momentum of the recently cancelled television masterpiece The Outer Limits, the brilliantly exploratory show that he unleashed upon the world and that, more importantly, conjured cinematographer Conrad Hall right out of nowhere and on a path to redefining color cinematography. To thin the membrane between cult American television and European art house cinema, it was filmed entirely in Esperanto, an entirely artificial language with no organic connection to any lived community, and it was framed as a folk horror film despite the “folk,” in this case, not existing. While other critics have pointed out this paradox as a simple curiosity, it’s really more of a thesis statement. While the “folk horror” genre purports to channel a group’s fears, Incubus almost – if you squint right – investigates the very idea of the genre: it implies an organic effusion of a single culture’s growth, but it, in fact, reminds us that “single culture” itself is entirely constructed object.

The film doesn’t “do” anything with this realization per-se, but it creates the strange allure of a demented object hiding within an ostensibly straightforward genre picture. It’s so short and askew that it feels like an entirely accidental deconstruction, a text that, by simply being itself, both reveals and unmakes itself. Who, or what, do the monsters of this film expose? What do they, or we, fear? No real culture summoned this thing for us, but the film itself suggests that it reflects any person’s fear and no one’s, that the “folk” in folk horror itself is a question to be curious about, not a given. It isn’t simply an index of a nation’s fear, but the idea of what that fear is “supposed” to look like. Incubus has the aura of post-modern classicism, a paradoxical texture, and truthfully, the film often feels as though it’s fading in and out, forgetting itself mid-scene. The bleached-out, low-quality film stock implies a world that is somehow both crystalline and amorphous, high-contrast and murky, like the film is trying to etherealize and corporealize before our eyes, is both completely sure and entirely unaware of what it really is.

Indeed, the characters themselves are out of sorts with the film they find themselves in. While Incubus technically explores doomed traveler Marc as he discovers the underlying terror lying await in a seaside community, it’s really the story of his would-be love Kia (Allyson Ames), a succubus who draws men in but is presently questioning her own participation in the gendered horror construction she’s found herself in. When Marc discovers “the earth is like a plate of glass” surrounded by “luminous bodies,” the film accrues a Lovecraftian tilt as a world far deeper and much more diffuse than he imagined dawns on him. Yet it is really Kia’s blindness that matters to the film, as she begins to question her own subscription to the rule-set of a cosmic fate that, in the film’s vagueness and irresolution, implies the film questioning its own narrative. When Marc’s sister is blinded from looking at the sun, the film cuts to Marc and Kia, whose overawed love is an obvious resonance of Marc’s myopia to the forces conspiring around him and Kia’s unthinking subscription to the powers governing her.

All this, and no use burying the lead any further, but Marc is also played by a certain William Shatner, right on the eve of being cast in a certain Star Trek. Incubus is not a final frontier into the furthest reaches of modernity but a deep dive into the abyss of the soul. More than one of the wanderers traversing this cinematic swamp was on the path to artistic and cultural superstardom. Others were never to be heard from again. The film feels like a strange vortex of comings and goings, of a ‘50s that was and a ‘60s that hadn’t yet found itself, like some sort of stray liminal fragment of the cinema of another dimension. Comparisons flicker up. Herk Hervey’s ethereal drifter Carnival of Souls is an obvious connection, and Bergman was probably a more intentional one (as many note), especially given that Bergman would soon fashion his own anguished horror effort in The Hour of the Wolf. With its themes of off-road locality exposing cosmic uncertainty, the film itself feels a bit like a way-station of where inexpensive, fuel-efficient exploitation and obstinate, effortful avant-garde somehow met. The film feels eternal and yet, somehow, like it couldn’t have been invoked more than three years earlier or later.

It is perhaps a product of cosmic fate, then, that the film can only confront the fact of its own diffusion into inconclusion by recognizing the immanence of its own death. By the film’s end, when a suddenly visible satanic creation freezes the text in a flash of negative-image celluloid, the film seems to reveal its true nature and then to recoil in the same split second, concluding on an ominous uncertainty that leaves the film hanging in tormented repose. It’s as though, having exposed itself too much, having clarified the evil, the film knows that it has encroached on the impossible and can only stop itself cold before it tears its own eyes out. Haunted by the realization that it has been quietly shivering apart under the weight of its own precarious inexplicability, the film chooses instead to gather its forces and explode in a strange, unassuming, but finally potent image of its own ecstatic self-destruction.

Score: 8/10